Bert Randolph Sugar, big, room-filling boxing commentator, sports historian, author and seated member among the all-time great characters of all sports, died yesterday, at 75, of cardiac arrest after a long bout with lung cancer.

Although half-Jewish, Sugar was particularly proud of his descendancy from Virginia’s British Colonial and Revolutionary War Randolph family. That did him no lasting good, however, as the Michigan law school grad and Madison Avenue advertising savant became a fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping ringsider with great stories to tell — many of them true — with only good times and great laughter attached to his presence.